I work in a field of healthcare – you can Google to find more – and I’ve moved around between several offices over the past 18 years. At one of the offices I’d worked in, the staff told me that a former social worker who’d been part of the team had left to write a book, an autobiography called ‘Bloody Social Worker.’ I bought it for a Secret Santa event that we were having, but due to some confusion I ended up keeping the book.
I read it recently. As someone who’s on the paperwork side of things, I don’t get to deal with the social work patients face to face, but I do deal with them over the phone. It’s always fascinating to hear of the more hands-on side of the field. Author Richard Wills details how he made a solid crack at what is basically an impossible job: supporting the town’s most vulnerable people under the Community Mental Health Team.
What seems to be the over-arching theme of the book is the stress that comes with dealing with mentally ill patients for decade: the toll it takes on the mind and the body when you’re supporting people who are frequently delusional, usually in some discomfort, and occasionally violent. This stress, it can’t be denied, is only exacerbated by the drip-drip effect of 14 years of Tory cuts, meaning fewer staff, and hence a bigger workload. Unfortunately, Labour haven’t particularly alleviated that situation since they took over. Social Workers are, on average, lasting 6 years in their jobs, according to Skills for Care. Less funding means fewer positions, which means as workers leave the profession, they aren’t necessarily replaced, meaning in turn that the workload is distributed across the rest of the team. Increased stress for the workers, longer waiting times for the clients.
It’s a clusterfuck.
The upshot of this: social work requires getting your clients to ‘let their guard down’ to describe in enough detail, what the problems are that they’re facing. The clients are less likely to discuss their problems, which are frequently highly personal, if the rapport between the client and the worker hasn’t been developed because they don’t get enough contact time.
You get the picture. It’s this disappointment, affecting all the clients, that – according to this book – led one service user to mail his dirty underwear to then-PM David Cameron in protest.
A fascinating, funny and depressing book. It just needed a tad of editing here and there, including one typo I spotted. But it’s great that Wills has taken the time to illustrate the pressures that these public services are under and the value to society that CMHT teams across the country bring, and the improvements they could make, with the right funding.
